Nelson (133 page)

Spanish guns were still firing hard to larboard, beyond the booming surf, and the boat had to pass eight sets of batteries on its homeward run, most if not all of them blazing blindly into the night. The helmsmen doubted they could make it, and even Nelson, who wanted to be propped up, thought it wise to ‘strike out to sea’ as they had coming out. But Josiah firmly disagreed. His stepfather needed urgent medical attention. Eventually, Nelson allowed him to take the tiller, and Josiah took the boat through the turbulent sea, the spray tossed here and there by the shrieking shot.
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Nearby they heard a great cry and the sounds of men drowning. It was the
Fox
cutter under Commander Gibson, sunk by a single shot below the waterline, and going to the bottom with one hundred and eighty men on board. A few struggling seamen were hauled into Nelson’s boat, and two managed to swim back to the
Emerald
. A boat returning with the injured Fremantle also picked up survivors, and a few others managed to keep themselves afloat long enough for the remaining boats with the ships to reach them. Four men of the
Theseus
were in the water so long that they developed pains in their limbs, loins and backs, but they were lucky. Fewer than half the men on the
Fox
survived. Gibson and ninety-six of his fellows were lost at a single stroke.

The flagship was the furthest out, and it was probably a little after three in the morning when her watch heard a voice hailing them out of the night. Josiah’s boat came alongside with the wounded admiral, and the men began to lower a chair. Nelson would not hear of it. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I have yet my legs and one arm’, and so saying he used a rope and his legs and left arm to struggle up the side unaided. William Hoste was aghast. ‘I leave you to judge of my situation, sir,’ he wrote home, when he saw ‘the man whom I may say has been a second father to me’ climbing on to the deck, ‘his right arm dangling by his side’. Yet he showed ‘a spirit that astonished everyone’ and ‘told the surgeon to get his instruments ready, for that he knew he must lose his arm, and that the sooner it was off the better’.
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He probably went down to the cockpit, a damp, dark place on the orlop deck below the water line, where surgeons normally stationed themselves during an action. There, beneath the shadowy and uncertain light of lamps swinging overhead to the roll of the ship, twenty-eight-year-old Thomas Eshelby examined the wound. Eshelby was a Yorkshireman, and a surgeon of some experience. The company of surgeons in London had authorised him to be a surgeon’s mate in 1791 and a surgeon three years later, and he had followed Nelson from the
Captain
to the
Theseus
. Betsy Fremantle thought him ‘a sensible young man’, but whatever his professional competence, he was certainly short-handed. One surgeon’s mate had gone to Santa Cruz and would never return. To help him, therefore, Eshelby turned to Louis Remonier, a twenty-four-year-old French royalist who had worked in Toulon Hospital, and served Nelson on the
Agamemnon
,
Captain
and
Theseus
. Also on hand were two or three seamen to act as assistants, one apparently Tom Allen, the admiral’s manservant, and a chaplain gravely preparing for the worst.
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Cutting the clothing from Nelson’s blood-sodden right arm and cleaning it as best he could, Eshelby found a compound fracture with severe tissue damage and a ruptured artery. Amputation was the commonest operation performed on ships but it caused the most fatalities. Eshelby had to work quickly to prevent the patient bleeding to death or traumatising, and he turned to his formidable array of instruments while the admiral was prepared for his horrific ordeal.

The surgeon needed to reduce the flow of blood to see what he was doing and used a tourniquet to depress the brachial artery. A leather strap was accordingly buckled around the admiral’s arm, above the wound, and tightened by means of a screw on the outside that drew its two ends through a compress that closed upon the limb. Ashore this type of amputation was sometimes performed upon patients sitting upright in a chair, but on the
Theseus
Nelson was probably put on his back, with sea chests serving as an operating table beneath him. There was nothing to arrest his pain. Novelists have written that such patients were given spirits and a leather pad to bite upon, but no surgeon’s journal of the time records either. Nelson endured the entire operation without an anaesthetic of any kind.

The assistants crouched forward to hold the stricken admiral, one or two firmly pinning his body down and another probably extending the crippled arm taut over the edge of the ‘table’, holding the limb by the part to be amputated. It was a grisly business, and if the Duke of
Clarence is to be believed one helper fainted and had to be replaced by the chaplain. Eshelby bent over with a sharp incision knife and made a rapid circular cut high above the wound, severing the skin, sinews and muscles of the upper arm to the bone, and allowing residual blood and tissue to fall into a receptacle below or splash freely upon the ship’s timbers. Nelson bore the mutilation stoically but he never forgot that first chilling coldness of the knife as it sliced through his flesh. Ever after he insisted that surgical instruments be warmed in water before use.
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Then an assistant drew the skin and tissue above the wound as far up the admiral’s arm as he could, a procedure that enabled Eshelby to reach the bone deep inside the stump. Before tackling the humerus, the surgeon probably secured the arteries, possibly by relaxing the tourniquet to allow them to be identified by the flow of blood. Peering intently in the gloom, he gently extricated each artery with a pair of forceps and bound them with broad silk ligatures or waxen thread. A fine-toothed handsaw was then applied to the bone itself. Using one hand to steady the shredded arm, Eshelby worked quickly with the saw in the other, skilfully avoiding splintering the bone as he cut through. Once the limb had been amputated, the skin and tissue being held back above the wound were allowed to retract over the severed humerus, leaving the two ligatures attached about two inches up the wound, hanging out. They would help drain the injury of infectious matter, and in several weeks slip out as the arteries below the ligatures rotted away. The operation had lasted about thirty minutes and ended when the edges of Nelson’s stump were finally brought together by dry lint and strips of adhesive plaster, and dressed.

Eshelby has since been much criticised for tying the median nerve with an artery in one of Nelson’s ligatures, but there are grounds for acquitting the harassed surgeon. Beneath the dim, wavering light of a ship’s lantern, it would have been difficult for Eshelby to see the median nerve as he struggled to secure an artery deep within the wound. Moreover, in the late eighteenth century it was not always considered bad practice to include the median nerve with a ligature. Innovative London surgeons were becoming critical of the process, pointing out that ligatures separated more easily from wounds if arteries had been secured independently of the nerve, but their advice was by no means universally accepted elsewhere.
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When Nelson was helped to his cot, it seemed that his ordeal had been justified. The patient was given pills of opium and advised to
rest. As he closed his eyes, the admiral still knew little of what was happening ashore. No tidings from the town had reached him, and the distant noise of battle continued. Before sleeping, Nelson put a ragged, unpractised left-hand signature to a fine copy of the terms to be offered the Spanish garrison and gave some orders for the disposition of the squadron. Even at this stage he hoped Troubridge might yet be successful and that good news might arrive.

Unfortunately it did not.

All the signs were bad ones. As the weather grew squally some of the boats began to return, protesting their inability to land anywhere, and a few found themselves immediately redeployed searching for more survivors of the
Fox
. Firing from the town subsided after a few hours, but the Spanish batteries of the Paso Alto and Torre de San Andres to the northeast continued to exchange shots with the British ships. Indeed, as the morning developed the enemy guns seemed to find their range. They hit the
Culloden
,
Emerald
and the mortar launch and forced the
Theseus
to cut her cable and shift position. It was ominous, for had Troubridge conquered, those Spanish batteries would have been silenced.

In fact, daylight found Troubridge’s party still besieged in the convent. From its upper storey the British fired on any opponents intrepid enough to approach too closely, raising cheers as they did so. They replenished some of their military supplies, and had small successes. According to Captain Waller, ‘several Spanish officers and near a hundred men came in and laid down their arms’. It encouraged the British to believe that the desertions the German pilot had spoken of might yet take place. Unfortunately, their enemies still commanded the adjacent streets with muskets and field pieces, and time was on their side. Troubridge could not be reinforced, but the Spanish forces were being concentrated and swollen by incoming militia.

The near hopelessness of Troubridge’s position was rubbed in whenever he took the offensive. Reflecting upon the ease with which he had stormed the Concepción battery, Miller still thought for a while that fortune might favour them. The captains talked again about making a desperate thrust at the citadel, the command centre of Santa Cruz, but without scaling ladders or adequate ammunition the task
looked insuperable. Nonetheless, according to Troubridge’s dispatch he marched out on precisely that errand. One of the more fanciful Spanish narratives even speaks of the British making a brave but unsuccessful assault on the citadel, led by a sergeant of marines in shirtsleeves and a frigate captain. The truth seems to be that Troubridge formed his men and probed the investing forces, but quickly realised that he was hemmed in and thought better of the idea. He and Miller led sorties against the enemy field pieces, but the Spaniards wheeled them from one place to another, and after taking casualties the British fell back upon their convent. Finally, Troubridge did the only thing left open to him, and tried to talk his way out.

While his men prepared incendiaries Troubridge sent Oldfield to the citadel, accompanied by two Dominican friars fully able to testify to what was going on in the convent. Oldfield’s message was bold and illustrated the sheer lust for plunder that underlay the British operation. Troubridge threatened to burn the town if the royal treasury and property of the Philippines Company were not handed over. It was a bold position, but a preposterous one. Don Antonio Gutierrez de Otero y Santayana was sixty-eight years old, a professional soldier who had grown wise in his country’s service, and he recognised a weak hand when he saw one. He had remained calm throughout the entire crisis, even when the British looked about to carry the town, and now rejected the demands outright. The friars were so afraid that they refused to return to the convent; Oldfield was sent back with entirely fictitious but chilling Spanish claims that their forces numbered nine thousand.

That card played and blocked, Troubridge sent Captain Hood to make the best terms he could. They were honourable, so much so that one Spanish officer, sensing his people were on the eve of an historic victory, refused to be bound by them. The British were granted safe passage to their ships with their colours and arms. Both sides agreed to release their prisoners, and Troubridge undertook to withdraw without burning the town or making any further attack upon either Tenerife or any of the Canary Islands. Circumstanced as they were, both sides had a bargain. Troubridge extricated his men from an impossible situation, and Don Antonio saved his town and islands from further damage and claimed the honour of having repulsed the victors of Cape St Vincent. As news of the agreement spread, the outlying Spanish forts, which had been firing sporadically upon Nelson’s ships, fell silent.
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And so, early on the 25th, the battle-stained rump of Nelson’s expeditionary force marched proudly to the mole under their arms and banners, fifes blowing and drums beating. Among the urgent onlookers, the Spaniards observed an old-fashioned courtesy, standing in files with bands playing, but the French sailors jostling beneath their tricolour jeered as the British passed and Troubridge’s officers had difficulty preventing their men from retaliating with blows. Troubridge was at the mole when the incident happened, and fired off a furious protest about the ‘rascally murderous kill-killing French’ to Don Antonio when he heard about it, but there were profuse apologies and equanimity was restored. More; as the war-weary British recovered their prisoners, dead and wounded, and waited to embark, they were served wine, bread and cheese, and their seriously injured received attention at the local hospital. British accounts are unanimous in their praise of the humanity of their Spanish foes. Troubridge reported that Don Antonio ‘showed every mark of attention in his power’, and reciprocated as much as he could. It was at Troubridge’s suggestion, warmly endorsed by Nelson, that the British carried Don Antonio’s official sealed dispatches to his country announcing the British defeat.
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At about seven in the morning the news of the defeat was brought to the
Theseus
by Captain Waller and a Spanish officer in a boat. Nelson ordered a flag of truce to be raised, and all firing ceased. What boats the British had left were sent to collect the survivors, and other boats were loaned by the Spaniards. The battle of Tenerife was over.

For Midshipman Hoste there was some particularly stinging news. He heard that Lieutenant John Weatherhead had been badly wounded, and was coming out on a Spanish launch. Hoste was almost stupefied with grief. ‘This was a stroke which . . . I could hardly stand against,’ he wrote. John had been shot on the beach, and found by a Spanish officer, who had torn his own shirt and clothing to wipe away blood and form a torniquet. The young Briton was a fine man, the Spaniard recalled, and one he was proud to help. While Hoste prepared a berth aboard the
Theseus
, hoping against hope, Weatherhead was brought alongside the ship and hoisted aboard on a cradle. He was in great pain, with a messy hole in his stomach, and violently vomited green and yellow fluids. Eshelby managed to give him a little tea, sago and soup, and dosed him with opium, but there was no hope. At twenty-four one of the brightest of Nelson’s protégés was dying.
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